


kintsukuroi

by GalacticGoat



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: (...for now.), (Not permanent though), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Character Death, Gods, M/M, Mystery, Rewrite, Supernatural Elements, Swearing, more TBA - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 12:52:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12458196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalacticGoat/pseuds/GalacticGoat
Summary: Hide hasn’t kissed anyone since he was seventeen. He knows he’s supposed to reciprocate while this is happening--he’s not stupid--but the contract is making quick work on him. It’s like the screws of his soul are being loosened and ripped out, like his shelling is being pried off so he’s just pieces of machinery quickly losing the pipelines that keep them connected.“Gestalt theory,” Investigator Mado had written up on the board during training once. “The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. Usually a psychological term, but perfectly applicable to biology and magic, too. Contracts rely on it.”He thought he understood the theory before, but in the midst ofactually being disassembled, the meaning is five thousand times more personal....He doesn’t know exactly when he stopped being alive.





	kintsukuroi

 

Hide dedicates an entire month to studying like hell, all for the sake of convincing his instructor to kill him on one fine Saturday morning.

Even after presenting the results of digging through two decades’ worth of archival reports to an entire committee of higher-ups, he barely gets what he wants. But somewhere along the way one of the newer, more popular figureheads caves in, all starry-eyed over making amends and “being the bigger man,” and the vote goes from lopsided against Hide, to equally for and against him, to lopsided in his favor.

It takes about another week for him to get the final thumbs-up.

Then on that fine, aforementioned Saturday, Hide finds himself sitting on a matted floor, staring at a sigil on the wall that was painted with his own blood. He had forked a vial of it over to the CCG the day before.

The sigil itself is surprisingly simple, with two circles stacked on top of each other. The outer rim is lined with symbols for death, suspension, then reanimation--in that exact order. Self-explanatory. The inner circle only has one symbol; a large, all-seeing eye.

Hide squints at it for a long, contemplative moment.

“Does anyone else with a Div focus think the Third Eye on their sigil looks like a lemon?”

Two people behind him snicker, and a third groans in exasperation, “ _Shut up, Wanatabe_.”

Hide shrugs, cracking a smile despite the fact that no one can see it. It feels fake.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says lightheartedly. “Just had to voice that thought.”

Then he settles onto his back with a sigh, arms tucked behind his head as he stares upwards. The ceiling has the type of cheap tiling typically found in an office; the kind that starts to sag and fall through its brackets after decades of getting old and moldy, but that won’t be a problem here. The building’s a few years younger than Hide.

His classmates are shuffling around him, setting up their own respective spots. The girl to his right is busy making a ring around herself, alternating between laying down arrowroot and roses that are the same deep-red as her blouse. The boy on his other side is trying to shove an impossible amount of cardamom into the pockets of his tight leather pants--Hide wonders what kind of target calls for _that_ kind of dress code.

The murmuring and softened footsteps are repetitive and lulling, coaxing his nervous energy out, letting it drip into the floor for the first time in weeks. The room’s muggy and dark to the point that his mind starts to drift even, up until someone across the room snorts, “Wanatabe, are you taking a _nap_?” He jolts to full attention, still on his back.

“Nope,” he says, keeping his voice composed. “Just meditatin’.”

A beat of silence.

“Sure,” they respond with an amused tone.

“ _Somebody_ ’s been wasting their sleeping time on abusing their second sight,” another classmate chimes in. The same one that had told him to shut up earlier.

Hide opts to sit up, only so he can ward off his classmates with a sheepish roll of his shoulders.

“Can you blame me?” he asks. “There’s no shame in trying to get a lay of the land beforehand, right?”

Some of them hum along in agreement. A few of the non-Div students mumble something along the lines of “fuck you.”

They all stray back to their respective spots after that almost-silence stretches for a little too long, and Hide doesn’t have much to occupy the remainder of his time. He nudges his bouquet of white roses closer to his side, then flips through a few pages of his Japanese literary classics. It doesn’t make him feel much better about what’s about to happen.

Everyone seems to have gotten their things laid out, and the resulting quiet is three steps away from being tangible--the seconds tick by, and the air is tense enough that he could almost choke on it. Hide fiddles with a loose strand of his bleached hair that’d fallen out of his ponytail. He chews on the side of his lip.

The girl wearing red to his right has been eyeing his items with a rapt sort of confusion, and he sees a question forming in her head long before she moves to open her mouth.

And then he’s happy that his instructor, Investigator Mado arrives before the girl actually asks who he’s trying to find, because then he would have to answer with a curt “Sorry, right now that’s classified,” which never sounds particularly good when you’re trying to be inconspicuous.

Investigator Mado prioritizes efficiency above all else, so she wastes no times on greetings when she walks through the doorway.

“If you haven’t signed the waiver and appropriate paperwork, get out,” she says, coming to a sharp stop in the middle of the room. No one budges. Her gaze deliberately scans over her students, looking for an outlier. She doesn’t find one.  

“Good.”

She flips open the pendant resting around her neck, and catches the human tooth that falls out, right into her palm. It’s painted in dried blood. Twenty dots of it, one from each of the testees.

“In one minute I’m going to destroy this tooth, and the test will begin.”

Investigator Mado doesn’t bother explaining what the destruction of the tooth entails. They all took the basic classes and understand the big idea of the spell. Only three casters in all twenty-three of the wards are licensed to actually use Necromancy, and Investigator Mado is one of them.

“Best of luck,” she says, though there’s not much feeling behind the words. She strides over to the corner of the room and starts marking up only gods-know-what on her clipboard.

The room stays quiet. Five or six of the students whip out their phones and peck out a message, probably something along the lines of “I love you” to a parent. Hide wrote an anonymous letter to his parents saying essentially the same thing last night.

He lays back down. Takes deep breaths. Double-checks the symbol scribbled onto his wrist, making sure the ink hadn’t smudged and ruined the cryptic eye patch and grinning teeth. He’s not much of an artist, so redoing it properly just seconds before test starts is nigh-impossible.

Investigator Mado clicks her pen, and tucks it in her pocket, catching the attention of everyone in the room. “Starting in fifteen seconds.”

She waves her fingers and the tooth is suspended above her palm now, its edges starting to char despite the lack of fire.

“Ten,” she says.

Half the class scrambles to lay down and get comfortable. The other half are watching apprehensively, like they can see the exact mechanics of the spell playing out before their eyes.

“Nine, eight, seven,” she says, and Hide thinks his sigil on the wall might be burning--it seems to be turning black in the corner of his eye.

“Six, five, four,” she says, and no one does anything.

“Three, two, one.”

The people who were sitting upright slump over in unison while Investigator Mado remains unfazed; the girl with the arrowroot and roses ends up facing him when she hits the mat, and her eyes are wide open.

Hide snaps his own eyes shut, just to make it all feel less eerie.

He thinks he feels the magic calcifying in his bloodstream, clots creeping up into his heart and brain and expanding until the ventricles can’t contract, until his synapses don’t have the means to fire.

And then he’s psuedo-dead.

 

* * *

 

The first five minutes feel like a whole lot of nothing.

He’s in a stretch of colorless space with no up, down, left, or right, and there’s no way to tell whether he’s standing or falling because there’s no ground or ceiling. There’s no way to tell if he actually exists either, because he doesn’t have a body.

Hide hasn’t ever wasted much time wondering what it’s like to really be dead. He’s arrogant enough to assume that he’s got a particularly large streak of luck that simply _can’t_ let that happen, so the train of thought hasn’t really struck him before. But those first five minutes really get him thinking.

He starts toeing around the line of “overthinking it” when something finally happens.

The lack of anything and everything is like an untouchable pressure--more of an urge, and it does most of the work for Hide. It ropes bits and pieces of himself stretched across the void and starts condensing them, clipping them together particle by particle.

Suddenly he has a heart.

Then a head.

Then a torso, arms, legs, and everything in between, and Hide is pleasantly surprised to find that once again, he exists.

“Great,” he murmurs to himself, relieved that the “suspension” symbol on his sigil did its job correctly.

Body now back intact, he’s free to roam the Beyond.

Hide doesn’t move a muscle; the plane itself stretches and warps to transport him where he wants to be, time and time again. The imagery never changes, mainly because there is no imagery in the first place. He can only judge that he’s moving based on the swooping feeling in his stomach.

The worst part is that the realm is significantly more foreboding in person, and the overwhelming sense that he shouldn’t be there winds its way around his windpipe like a slow, deliberate, constricting snake. That wasn’t something he ever felt in his dreams. He remembers the disembodied moans and hoarse, pained whispers in his ears from prior nights, but when cold fingers trace lines against his spine and someone’s warm breath ghosts down his neck, his skin  breaks out in nervous goosebumps.

“Hello?” he calls out, and his voice doesn’t carry at all. There’s no echo, no reverb, so it’s gone almost the second it leaves his mouth.

No one responds to him either, which was kind of what he was expecting.

He urges the plane to bend again.

No one’s there.

He bends it again.

No one’s there.

He bends it again, and this time when he calls out, an invisible hand lightly presses its nails against the skin of his collarbone, like it’s considering digging through all the bones and flesh and blood up until it finds a warm, comfortable home right next to Hide’s heart.

His second sight helpfully informs him that this hand doesn’t belong to a person or an entity, but rather, the realm itself. That doesn’t sound good.

Hide stays expressionless, trying to seem indifferent.

Then he demands the plane to warp, as if he could run away from the damn thing, and right as his stomach starts another somersault, the hand clamps onto his shoulder and _yanks_.

He flies backwards instead of forwards and his heels go over his head and all the air in his body leaves with an unceremonious _woosh_ and there’s no ground but he still manages to skid upon landing somehow, limbs twisting and tangling up until momentum decides it’s had enough, and Hide is a mess laying on the not-ground, staring up at something that is decisively _not_ the usual void. He blinks. A thousand and one eyes blink back.

“Hi,” he weakly says to the mass of grey mist and insect legs that is floating above him.

Its response appears in Hide’s head, a word that bubbles up to the forefront of his mind.

_...Hi?_

They go back to staring each other down.

Hide can feel that his dress shirt has ridden up, untucked and awkwardly hanging out from his dress pants as he stays sprawled on his back. He’s probably flashing an uncomfortable amount of skin right now. In a desperate attempt to look calm, _keep it together_ , he moves to tuck it back into place. He takes his eyes off of the god, right as the god finds the composure to speak.

_Who are you?_

He straightens out his shirt. Furrows his eyebrows. Thinks about how much truth he’s wagering right here, right now.

“I’m Hideyoshi, but my friends just call me Hide,” he finally answers. He looks back up at the god--at one eye specifically, and his eyesight seems to splinter into triple-vision in protest, which he dutifully ignores.

The god shifts a little.

 _Um_ , it says, sounding a little uncertain. _Nice to meet you._

Hide cracks an encouraging smile at it. In reality, all he wants to do is curl up in a ball and nurse the headache that’s suddenly pounding right behind his eye sockets, but he’s on a time crunch here.

“Do you have a name?” he asks.

He knows the answer he _wants_ to hear. He wants to hear it so badly that every cell of his being seems to shake with impatience when the god hesitates, thinking over its answer. Doing the same thing Hide did less than a minute beforehand.

Then it twists, angling itself so its largest eye is a little closer to Hide’s face, rather than towering above.

 _Kaneki Ken_ , it says.

Something along the lines of overwhelming excitement starts swelling up in Hide’s chest--it’s mixed in with a healthy dosage of terror. He props himself up on his elbow, offering a hand out to the god.

“It’s nice to finally meet you, Kaneki,” he says. The wattage on his smile has been amped up a significant degree.

The god hesitantly stretches out one of its legs, holding still long enough that Hide can wrap his fingers around it and give it a firm shake before pulling it back.

 _You’ve been looking for me?_ it asks.

“For weeks,” Hide adds, and he forces himself upright, onto his feet. The pressure in his head is getting a little unbearable which is concerning, but he keeps pushing past it. “I’m actually on a bit of a business call.”

 _A business call,_ the god echoes.

“Uh-huh.”

_People don’t do “business” with me._

The words are flat, suspicious. Hide scratches the back of his neck.

“Maybe not ten years ago, but superstitions aren’t really my thing.”

The god pauses. Looks him over. Moves in a way that almost seems like it’s letting out a sigh.

 _Tell me why you’re here_.

Hide swallows down his heart, which somehow managed to claw its way up into his throat. It’s like his head’s been forced into a compressor and he wants to stop everything to crack a hole in his skull to relieve the mounting stress.

“I want to--”

\--Something in his left eye pops. One side of his vision goes dark. He automatically claps a hand over his eye and yelps in surprise, right as the god scrambles out of his line of sight.

 _I’m sorry,_ it hurriedly says, _I’m sorry; I forgot humans aren’t supposed to look at gods when we’re like that and--uh, oh hell--_

Hide freezes up when a pair of human hands start clutching at his wrist, trying to pry it away from his eye.

“What the--” he starts, and the hands finally manage to wrench his arms away from his face. Hide finds a distinctly human face right across from his own. Its features aren’t concrete, shifting like a reflection in a pond, but it’s definitely human. Messy hair, neatly trimmed hair, wide eyes, narrowed eyes, a round, childlike face, a gaunt, corpse-like face, always changing. Never consistent.

“Let me see your eye,” the boy(--the god?) insists. And Hide’s left cheek is cupped in the boy’s palm, angling his face in a different direction.

“Oh.”

“Oh?” Hide repeats dumbly.

“Your eye is ruined.” The concern on the boy’s face is a sharp reflection of what it was when Hide saw it years ago, right down to way his lips are slightly parted as if he were on the verge of apologizing yet again. Hide forgets how to speak for a split second.

“This technically isn’t my real body,” he belatedly reasons.

The boy--the god-- _Kaneki_ doesn’t look satisfied with that logic.

“I have no idea what’ll happen to that eye once you’re out of the Beyond,” he fires back.

But Hide’s brain isn’t screaming with agony, and despite the sudden cut-back in his vision, all-in-all, he’s okay for the moment. His second sight’s not saying otherwise, either. So he wraps his fingers around Kaneki’s, and guides the god’s hands back to his side.

“I’ll be fine,” he says softly.

He has to give credit where it’s due--he’s not _far_ from freaking out regardless of the lack of pain. He needs his full eyesight in the same way he needs air to live; it’s a necessity, especially for his job. But if he starts to panic, then the god will panic. The police’s psychological report from 1997 covering Kaneki Ken, age 18, attests to that.  

He wastes a second to take a steadying breath, burying these feelings somewhere deep in his chest, rather than his head. Kaneki’s eyes--one grey, one red--watch him the entire time.

Hide decides that he needs to get to the point.

“I was going to ask you to make a contract with me.”

Kaneki’s expression twists into something even more indecipherable.

“Are you sure you want that?” he asks, and somewhere in that question Hide can taste the years upon years of finely aged self-hatred and distrust.

“I wouldn’t have spent so much time looking for you if I wasn’t positive,” Hide chimes. He offhandedly realizes his hands are covered in his own blood, and casually swipes them against the sides of his pinstriped slacks.

Kaneki nods. He pauses to chew on his lip, and Hide’s second sight opts to give him a flurry of thoughts and feelings, from temptation to confusion to “what’s the catch?” to “this isn’t going to end well.”

“What if I say no?” Kaneki asks. His voice is quiet. Almost child-like.

Hide shrugs.

“Then I walk out of here, and we’ll go our separate ways.”

There’s irony in that statement, and it comes from the fact that only Hide could actually go somewhere. The Beyond is like a prison for Kaneki, complete with blank-slate walls and crushing, paradoxical claustrophobia.

It’s a low blow. Hide knows it is. He’s built an entire persona back at the CCG so that when he takes these swipes, people will assume it’s because he’s ignorant--not an asshole.

Kaneki seems to make the same assumption when he offers a resigned “Okay,” and nothing else.

Something seems to occur to him. “The CCG is fine with you doing this?”

Hide twists his lip, then offers a slow, admittedly unprofessional shrug. “I drive a hard bargain.”

Kaneki raises a brow.  

He doesn’t rush to say anything in particular, just giving a skeptical half-nod before strolling to Hide’s left. There’s no time to protest before Hide’s jaw is being gripped and tilted side-to-side, as if he’s being inspected.

He starts to make a questioning noise, but Kaneki interrupts.

“What makes you different from Amon, exactly?”

His voice is taking up a hard edge, one that makes Hide’s second sight chime high and clear like a warning bell. The hand leaves his chin. Kaneki walks around to his other side, waiting expectantly for an answer.

Hide’s not one to get tripped up by nerves, but if he had a real stomach right now, he’d probably be feeling sick.

“It would be pretty awful to try and compare myself to a man I never got the chance to properly meet,” he says, forcing his voice to stay unassuming. Optimistic. The prime example of the CCG’s supposed village idiot. “I don’t know how we’re different, Kaneki. We just are.”

He gets a long, hard stare.

“The last contract I made nearly killed me--it killed Amon,” Kaneki says. “Is it going to kill you?”

Hide knows he should give a firm answer, something that’ll put Kaneki’s paranoia at ease. But he doesn’t.

“I sure hope not,” he says instead.

Another stare.

“You really aren’t Amon.”

“Told you so.”

Kaneki takes another stroll around Hide, lazy and somewhat predatory.

But Hide knows people pretty well, and apparently ex-people too. The confidence is all faked.

“Why do you want a contract?” Kaneki asks. His face is starting to solidify into something consistent, pale-skinned with angry, jarring scars across his left eye.

Playing along with the act, Hide lowers his eyes. Stares at the not-ground.

“Something weird’s been making its rounds through the wards,” he answers. “Our high-ranking investigators keep getting put out of commission, so the promotion rate in the training academy keeps getting bumped up so that we have more investigators to throw at it.”

Kaneki says nothing.

“I’m tired of it,” Hide adds, egged on by the lack of response. “The other gods are powerful and all, but something about their approach isn’t working, obviously. Otherwise this would’ve been over in June.”

More silence, and at this point Kaneki is standing out of his line of vision, so he can’t gauge any reactions. His second sight’s quiet, too.

Hide wonders if he gave himself away a little too much.

But then Kaneki’s voice is right behind him, ghosting up his spine like a slow-acting poison… Or a sedative. It doesn’t seem as aggressive as it did before. “You want a demigod, rather than a god,” he murmurs.

“I--” Hide starts. Swallows his words. Spits something less jumbled out instead. “Yes.”

“You want me to be your attack dog?”

Hide shakes his head ever-so-slightly. “Gods, no. You’re a person. I want you to be my partner.”

“Hm.”

Suddenly there are hands on his shoulders; it takes an inhuman amount of strength not to flinch in surprise but he manages--barely. The hands gently nudge him to turn around and he stiffly complies, coming face-to-face with Kaneki.  

“Did you read my file?” Kaneki asks.

Hide can’t help but snort, ruining whatever nervous mood he’s been trying to play up. “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but. Yes. Obviously.”

Kaneki twists his lip, almost as if he’s trying his hardest not to bite his own tongue.

“So you know the embarrassing parts.”

Hide quirks the corner of his mouth up, offering an understanding look. “I know that you have a different way of making contracts,” he confirms. “You offered your heart to a girl, she tried to literally rip it out, you accidentally ripped out hers instead.”

Kaneki blinks.

“Feelings suck. Origin stories suck too,” Hide concludes.

A sigh.

Then Kaneki leans in, and presses his lips lightly to Hide’s--almost experimentally. He leans back.

“You’re fine with this?”

Hide’s thoughts are fragmented a bit, but not in a bad way. “As long as it doesn’t kill me,” he manages to say, and carefully drapes his arms on Kaneki’s shoulders. For support, of course. He’s lucky his voice doesn’t crack.

A doubtful look.

“Okay,” Kaneki replies. He moves in with more certainty this time, motions slow and methodical as it becomes less of a lip-to-lip gesture, and more of a kiss. It’s nice. Cautious.

Hide hasn’t kissed anyone since he was seventeen. He knows he’s supposed to reciprocate while this is happening--he’s not stupid--but the contract is making quick work on him. It’s like the screws of his soul are being loosened and ripped out, like his shelling is being pried off so he’s just pieces of machinery quickly losing the pipelines that keep them connected.

“Gestalt theory,” Investigator Mado had written up on the board during training once. “The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. Usually a psychological term, but perfectly applicable to biology and magic, too. Contracts rely on it.”

He thought he understood the theory before, but in the midst of _actually being disassembled_ , the meaning is five thousand times more personal.

...He doesn’t know exactly when he stopped being alive.

Kaneki is holding him up--when had his legs given out?--giving him a remorseful frown. Something about it sets off a pang of sympathy in Hide. He tries shooting Kaneki an awkward, comforting grin. His face doesn’t move.

Kaneki shifts him, laying him on his back so he’s staring up at the not-sky. From what Hide can see, the god doesn’t look too sure of himself.

“Sorry,” he says, and he obviously means it. “You won’t want to be awake for this next part.”

Then Kaneki’s form seems to dissolve back into something along the lines of what it was before; insect legs and lidless eyes and grey mist that seems to spiral into fractals. Hide’s thoughts whirr like the processor of an overworked computer, trying desperately to keep up with it until suddenly, he can barely think.

Kaneki closes in, and Hide is not quite sure whether he goes unconscious or not. The not-sky and the backs of his eyelids are the same color.

Words that he can’t hear trickle up to the forefront of his mind.

 

_I promise I’ll make this quick._

 

And then Hide stops thinking about anything at all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> biggest plot twist ever: tic managed to write 4000+ words and NOT hate the final results
> 
> it's been what, eight months, and it's about durn time i came back with SOME sort of content! on my [writing tumblr](http://galactic-goat.tumblr.com/) i was talking about rewriting my old fic, [pass or fail](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5415065/chapters/12511364) (warning for cringey old writing), and hopefully continuing the storyline in a manner that wasn't botched by the first chapter being originally intended as a oneshot, ahah. (also maybe, just /maybe/ i wanted to tone down some of the stuff that made it painful to reread.) i have a plot; i have world building; now all i need is more time! i've got college stuff to do too though, so i'm not going to provide exact post-dates, because i ain't about making standards that i'll probably immediately break, ahah. still gonna do my best to post as often as i can without botching the quality!
> 
> some not-really-organized thoughts:
> 
> -title's a WIP! struggling to find something that really encapsulates whatever mood i'm going for, and this is the best attempt so far, pfft.  
> -sorry for any typos or weird errors; i don't have a beta, but i'm not looking for one due to that whack scheduling i mentioned earlier.  
> -the song i've been mainly writing this stuff to is ["run" by daughter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psiILfa-G1c)... i'll probably post a lot of song recs as things progress
> 
> anyways, i hope y'all liked this! it's been a bit since i've been on the TG scene, but since chapter 144 of tg:re came out i've been scrambling to catch up! my writing style's been experiencing some interesting tweaks, but i'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's going to make me a stronger writer in the long run.
> 
> finally, thanks for reading! :'^)


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